Comments

Tequila MockingjayBird: Seems like we will finally see the end of the oft heard notion that you need huge lenses and super wide apertures to get the professional pictures, thanks to the AI & ML by Google.

Forget bokeh? That's the whole point of the article you are commenting on!!

retr01976: Honestly both are very close. Really no point in comparing the two, it really comes down to which OS you prefer and which device has the best offering of editing apps. People change out phones every two years now and the quality of phone cameras is improved on almost a quarterly basis now.

Focal length on the pixel is terrible for portraits, though. 56mm on the iPhone makes for much more natural looking perspectives. That seems more important than minute differences in rendering to the overall picture.

Androole: It's quite astonishing to me how Google has managed to come out with such a superior implementation given the two years that Apple has had to refine its algorithms and hardware for this specific application. It suggests that Google's machine learning capabilities are really on a different level.

I definitely grant the iPhone sometimes results in nicer colours, but those are easy to adjust in post, while blown highlights and glitchy artifacts burned into a JPEG are either forever unrecoverable or require significant effort in sophisticated software like Photoshop. Clearly not what anyone is going to be doing with shots from their smartphone.

The shot with the A7r III and 55/1.8 was a really interesting contrast, too. The FF shot simply had too little DOF. For that sort of close focus distance, it really needed to be stopped down to at least f2.8.

I like what google is doing, but the longer focal length of the Apple makes for much more pleasing and natural looking portraits.

Tequila MockingjayBird: Seems like we will finally see the end of the oft heard notion that you need huge lenses and super wide apertures to get the professional pictures, thanks to the AI & ML by Google.

Given the price of current phones, this definitely isn't the cheapest or easiest way to take "bokeh" pics.

jbroehl: Apologies in advance if this is a newbie question, I've been on Android for a while and not following Iphones very closelyWhy is the 8 plus considered but not the regular 8? Better camera than the regular 8?

Iphone 8 doesn't have the second camera that is used to create the portrait mode pictures. Only the 7 Plus, 8 Plus and X has that. So the regular smaller 8 cannot take pictures with the simulated bokeh/blur.

Google can do it with the one camera, but Apple's method needs 2 cameras (And provides more reliable results, IMO)

It's not like these are going to fool anyone coming from a big sensor and a pile of fast primes when viewed large. But on instagram or in a typical small album/book where most of the population views their photos? These are getting awfully close!

anticipation_of: Very interesting proof of concept. Shame they haven’t quite pulled it off as a practical camera. By the time they get their firmware sorted out the tech will have probably moved on; hopefully, they stick around long enough to make a Version 2. Done properly, this could be pretty great.

Rumor has it that the next Huawei Leica phone will have 3 cameras and perform similar tricks. Sure 16 > 3, but I think by the time Light has really escaped beta, cell phones will have killed it's reason for being already.

ecka84: If we are going to ignore the price, then what makes it a better option than Samsung's 16TB SSD?

Short term, they are not getting cheaper, but over a few years, they are insanely cheap. In the server/enterprise market, SSD have all but eliminated 15K disk drives from the market due to near cost parity.

ecka84: If we are going to ignore the price, then what makes it a better option than Samsung's 16TB SSD?

The enterprise class server ones I am used to seeing are 3x that or more. Anyone considering that much SSD space is probably an enterprise customer. If you aren't, I would buy a stack of smaller capacity ones. 8x2TB SSD is only $4k